LongHouse Food Revival serves up delicious sermon

Molly O'Neill, the founder and creative director of the LongHouse Food Revival.

Rensselaerville, N.Y. — The 2014 LongHouse Food Revival, September 13-14 in Rensselaerville, brainchild of food writer Molly O'Neill, was as spirited as any religious meeting seeking to save souls, convert the wayward and redeem the downtrodden. All the people there, it seemed, were already converted to the gospel of food and media. These already converted were seeking higher planes of consciousness, great stories, and good eats.

The evening before the main event, the barns at LongHouse were festooned with lights. Two portraits, one of a pig and the other a cow, both with boxing gloves on duking it out, painted by a man named Earl, decorated the outside of one of the barns.

King crab fritters, one of the appetizers before the dinner on Friday at the LongHouse barn. Ellen M. Blalock | eblalock@syracuse.com

The Rubble Cafe, the outdoor area between the barns, was abuzz with people, eating King crab fritters nestled in corn husks and oysters in a shell cradled in tufts of hay, courtesy of Chef Alicia Walter. The big round table inside the main barn was set to welcome the cooks, eaters, producers and thinkers of all things food.

On Saturday, the first official day of the event, the sky opened up and poured down torrents on the gathering. The rain-soaked clothes and dripping wet hair plastered to heads did not dampen the spirit of the Revival. The rain was baptismal.

Chefs Alex Young of Zingerman's Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Carlos Gaytan of Mexique in Chicago, Illinois, kept the fires in the open pit stoked. They protected the flame, Young's beef, and Gaytan's roast pig in the pit with makeshift bivouacs of tin and aluminum scraps they found in the storage barn.

The main sermon of the Revival was bipartite--from the gospel of moo on one side, and from the gospel of oink on the other. "Oink v. Moo: Midwestern Food Stories" was the theme of the Revival. Are beef brisket and Wisconsin cheese quintessential Midwestern foods? Or does the flying pig still rule not only in Cincinnati--Porkopolis--but elsewhere in the Midwest?

Imagine a mash-up of 21st century new media with the flavor of the 19th century Chautauqua Movement, all in a setting that resembles a typical Midwest county fair with every variety of pie, midway games, music and food you could walk with and talk while eating. That is the Revival.

Issues were debated and stories were told through the Revival's multimedia, Pop-Up Food Magazine, a cornucopia of images, sounds, music, and stories by Michael Twitty on "Collards, Yams & Me," Molly Gallentine on the joys of Jell-O, former Pullman railroad car porters and others.

The NPR's Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva (left) and Davia Nelson have fun posing in front of the pig and cow in boxing gloves paintings during the "Oink vs. Moo" LongHouse Food Revival.

The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva), Kathy Gunst and Von Diaz--NPR's resident producers and food storytellers cooked with the mouth and sated both the ear and the stomach. The stories ranged from hidden kitchens and the histories they harbor, to the sound, the distinctive crunch of chicharron.

One of the showdowns between the defenders of the cow and the pig featured New York Times' Kim Severson battling with CNN's Eatocracy's Kit Kinsman. The debate ended in a draw, despite Kinsman's pithy defense of the oink in a word: "Bacon."

The image of the idyllic Midwestern family farm is evident in today's farm-to-table movement. O'Neill asked folks to consider the following: the farmer who grows soybean as his sole crop and processes his crop to make soybean oil for the local McDonald's, is that not farm-to-table?

Midwest food stories and dishes were told, shared, and eaten. But, there were many instances of a word, a stanza, or a bite transporting this person or that person elsewhere. As O'Neill remarked at the end, "We are not in Kansas anymore." Everyone knew, by the end of the weekend, that they, indeed, had traveled to an "Oz."